Seeing the Wood for the Rineharts: that's diversity

There is fear Rinehart's move into Fairfax could result in less diversity in mainstream Australian media.

William West, file photo: AFP

On the face of it, Andrew Bolt has a point.

In yesterday's column in the Herald Sun (syndicated in Sydney's Daily Telegraph, though as usual with a much sillier headline, which isn't Bolt's fault) Australia's most-read columnist weighed into the hypocrisy of those 'anguished voices in the Fairfax newspapers, and on the ABC' who have been 'gibbering' and 'groaning' about Gina Rinehart's raid on Fairfax Media's share register, while welcoming the advent of a new online newspaper, the Global Mail, funded by Wotif entrepreneur Graeme Wood.

Wood, of course, is the man who, with Kathmandu founder Jan Cameron, bought the Triabunna woodchip mill in Tasmania from Gunns, with the declared intention of closing it down. He has given $1.6 million to The Greens. In political terms, Wood is the polar opposite of Gina Rinehart, and indeed of Andrew Bolt.

(Be it noted in passing that Bolt rejects the widespread assumption that it was Rinehart's influence, as a major shareholder in and director of the Ten Network, that brought The Bolt Report to our screens last year. "I worked at Ten before Rinehart bought into it, and was signed up for The Bolt Report by then-acting CEO Lachlan Murdoch, once my chairman here at News Ltd," he writes. Well, maybe. But the fact remains that The Bolt Report premiered on Ten in May last year, fully five months after Gina Rinehart became a board member. Both Murdoch and Rinehart have declared their admiration for Bolt's work.)

Bolt characterises the advent of The Global Mail like this:

"A super-rich boss with strong opinions from the political fringe now controls a media asset that's now pumping out the owner's world view."

As evidence, he points to the fact that most of The Global Mail's stable of journalists formerly worked for the ABC or Fairfax Media - both, in the eyes of Bolt and his readers, irredeemably leftist organisations. Its managing editor is Monica Attard, former ABC foreign correspondent, Walkley-award winning ABC radio interviewer and, of course, one of my predecessors in the Media Watch chair.

Bolt analyses the output of The Global Mail: three articles about the Occupy movement, three hostile articles about the mining industry, sympathetic profiles of Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull.

"We're told Wood has no control over his reporters," Bolt writes.

"He won't need it now that he's got a group-think collective which will, unbidden, take all the standard left positions."

Let's acknowledge that, on the strength of its first few days online, The Global Mail is not likely to appeal to Andrew Bolt's readers. It is more likely to appeal to tertiary-educated, professional people, with an appetite for long, considered and not especially up-to-the-minute stories from around the world.

Let's further acknowledge that more tertiary-educated, professional people (as opposed to self-employed small business people and big business executives) vote Labor or Green than Liberal or National - these are the 'liberal elites' and 'chattering classes' so often scorned by the likes of Andrew Bolt. Arguably, the same people form the target audience of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and (News Ltd columnists would certainly argue) of the ABC as well. And they're already being targeted by newer publications like Crikey, New Matilda and The Monthly.

The difference is that The Global Mail has far more money than the other newcomers - enough to employ resident correspondents in five overseas locations - and that it is not even going to attempt to make a profit, or even to pay its way, at least at first. As Monica Attard puts it, The Global Mail is an act of 'pure philanthropy' by Graeme Wood.

"He sees it as a gift to the Australian people."

It was not, however, Wood's idea; it was Attard's. She approached him with the idea of a philanthropically-funded journalistic endeavour, inspired by the American site Pro-Publica, though with less exclusive emphasis on investigative journalism. Wood agreed to stump up the money - $15 million over the next five years - but, according to Attard, will have no input whatsoever into The Global Mail's editorial output.

Those who will have a say sit on its Editorial Advisory Committee. They range from Four Corners reporter Marian Wilkinson (a fine journalist, but one whom Andrew Bolt would have no difficulty in dismissing as a leftie) to former ACCC head Graeme Samuel and former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Paul Steiger, neither of whom fit so easily into the 'left-leaning' basket. And incidentally, says Attard, she did approach two senior journalists from News Ltd to join her team. In the end, both decided to stay where they were.

If The Global Mail is going to be pumping out anyone's world view, it is Attard's, not Wood's - and she claims she has appointed the advisory committee to ensure that, as she puts it, "we stick to our mission". That mission, the Global Mail grandly declares, is "to deliver original, fearless, independent journalism". In the coming months and years, we'll all get a chance to see how it goes.

Meanwhile, I don't believe there would have been much gibbering and groaning, from leftie-lovies or anyone else, had Gina Rinehart decided to spend a tiny portion of her vast wealth doing precisely the same as Wood has done. In fact in my view, she would be absolutely entitled to set up an online newspaper and to make no bones about the fact that she did expect it to reflect her own view of the world. The Australian media scene needs more diversity, more points of view: the more, the merrier.

What is causing the angst and the gnashing of teeth about Rinehart's media moves into Ten and Fairfax is the simple fear that it could result not in more media diversity in the mainstream Australian media, but less.

Precisely what Rinehart's motives are, she isn't saying. Generally speaking, she doesn't say much publicly about anything she does (although she has had plenty to say about the Rudd and Gillard Government's plans in recent years). But it's known that her father Lang Hancock tried influencing public opinion with his own start-up publications, and came to the conclusion it was a mug's game. The mainstream media had all the clout, he concluded.

It's rather doubtful that her investments in Ten and Fairfax Media have been chosen for their potential to increase Rinehart's already substantial wealth - at least, not directly. The suspicion is that she wants to influence the tone and direction of the national conversation by buying into two established media companies, and attempting to influence their editorial content.

The problem with that, from the point of view of the lefties and lovies, can be summed up in two words: Rupert Murdoch. Or, if you prefer, News Ltd.

As it happens, a new book - yes, another - about Rupert Murdoch has just been published. Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power by David McKnight (Allen & Unwin) is not just another biography. McKnight is an Associate Professor of Journalism at UNSW. He's an unashamedly political animal. He's had a career-long interest in the politics of the Cold War, and has written about the modern culture wars between left and right, and what should replace them. His Murdoch book, as its subtitle suggests, focuses exclusively on how the most influential individual this country has ever produced uses his media power to advance his political beliefs.

Most Murdoch-watchers have claimed that to the extent that he picks sides in politics, Rupert Murdoch does so to further his financial interests and to maximise his media power. Governments, not oppositions, control issues such as media ownership and diversity; the trick, for a media owner such as Murdoch, is to make governments believe that they are in power because of your assistance, and might well lose power should you turn against them. Most observers have reckoned that he backs winners until he senses they are turning into losers, and then he backs next year's winner.

McKnight argues that this is wrong. The exercise of political influence, he argues, is one of the things that makes Murdoch tick, that infuses him with his legendary drive and energy. And after a brief flirtation with the left, which ended soon after Gough Whitlam was elected in 1972, he has sided with the right. McKnight persuasively shows how one of the founding fathers of the populist conservatism that captured the Reagan Democrats, and the Howard battlers, and kept Margaret Thatcher in power for a decade and more, was Rupert Murdoch.

Yes, McKnight concedes, Murdoch's British newspapers did support Tony Blair for a decade too: but only because Blair went along with Murdoch's obsessions, particularly in rejecting a closer integration with Europe, and in embracing the foreign policy of George W Bush.

At the root of Murdoch's politics, argues McKnight, is his image of himself as a radical, anti-establishment, anti-intellectual figure, a man who despises as much as he is despised by the liberal elites and chattering classes. In that sense, The (Melbourne) Herald Sun, the (Sydney) Daily Telegraph, The (London) Sun, The New York Post, and above all, Fox News, are authentic megaphones for their master's voice. None of those organs, nor their boss, have ever had much time for the separation of news from comment. They are all about speaking to their audiences in a clear, unambiguous political voice.

Murdoch is so dominant a figure in News Corporation, says McKnight, that he doesn't need to issue directives to his editors, principal columnists and presenters. To adapt a couple of Andrew Bolt's colourful phrases, Murdoch has created within News Corporation "a group-think collective which will, unbidden... pump out the owner's world view".

McKnight has his own political leanings, which are certainly not to the right. In my view, that doesn't make his portrayal of Murdoch's politics unfair or inaccurate; but it does perhaps lead him to understate a very simple truth: the tone of News Corporation's publications, in Australia, the US and the UK, captures perfectly the hopes, the fears and the aspirations of a mass audience. Without that ability to encapsulate popular taste - in movies and TV programs, in sports coverage and gossip, as well as in political opinion - News Corporation would not have the power and influence that it has.

From what we know of them both, there is probably not all that much that Rupert Murdoch and Gina Rinehart would disagree about, when it comes to politics or economics (except, perhaps, for Murdoch's love for his adopted country; from the family emails recently made public, it seems Rinehart is not a fan of the United States of America). And according to David McKnight, despite his departure from the family firm, Lachlan Murdoch is closer to his father politically than are any of his other three adult children. Indeed, according to News Ltd veteran Mark Day, the emperor has decided to reoccupy the chair of his Australian province, News Ltd, to keep it warm for the return of the prodigal son.

The concern of the gibberers and groaners about Rinehart's move into Fairfax is simple: there are only two major nationwide newspaper companies in Australia. If one of them is run by someone who makes no bones about using his papers to further a right-wing populist agenda, we don't need the other to be bought by someone with similar obsessions. Besides, Gina Rinehart has not spent a lifetime, like the Murdochs, father and son, learning how to combine populism and right-wing politics into a successful mass media blend. There's a concern - probably shared by the members of Fairfax Media's board - that she might try to use its nationwide reach in the same way as she used the megaphone when she stood on the back of a truck in Perth and denounced the Rudd government's Resource Rent Tax.

That may be grossly unfair to Gina Rinehart. We don't know, because she ain't saying. And in any case, she will undoubtedly find that it's hard to parley a partial shareholding into much in the way of influence over the editorial policies of a media company with a strong tradition of journalistic independence.

But even the attempt might be unhelpful to Fairfax Media which, as everyone knows, is at a perilous stage in a journey that will take it either into a healthy digital future, or into eventual break-up or bankruptcy. It doesn't need political battles on its board, or political coverage in its news pages, that risks alienating its established audience.

Fairfax's new online readership may be large, but it's fickle and hard to monetise. Much though Andrew Bolt may despise the chattering classes, it's they who subscribe to the hard copy versions of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. For quite a while longer, Fairfax desperately needs them to go on doing just that.

Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of ABC TV's Media Watch. View his full profile here.